In a recent letter to the editor in Education Week, a teacher takes issue with the idea that segregation within the U.S. system of public education is reemerging because, he says, it has never gone away. Commenting on a remark that today's students learn about segregation from their history books, Howard J. Eagle writes,For the 100-plus students I teach daily at James Madison Middle School in Rochester, New York, segregation is—in addition to a chapter in their history textbooks or a topic for the debate team—a daily fact of life in their classrooms, whose composition is almost 100 percent African American. (2002, p. 40)
Despite the federal mandates, “the United States has never come remotely close to achieving full . . . integration of the vast majority of its public schools,” he writes. And as for equity,considering the current pitiful state of affairs overall, it is probably difficult for many people to look back and imagine that less than 50 years ago, conditions were considerably worse.
In this issue in which writers explore the theme “Equity and Opportunity,” Gary Orfield and his colleagues (p. 16) corroborate Eagle's impression that many students today are attending racially segregated schools. According to their research, the average white student attends a school that is almost four-fifths white. The average Latino student attends a school in which more than half of the students are Latinos. And the average black student attends a school that is almost two-thirds minority.
But segregation is an old problem, one that is almost off the radar screens in today's opinion polls, and considered either solved or not solvable. Although in the past we tried everything—from protests to affirmative action, legislation to court order—to achieve racial and economic justice, the more politically correct approach today is to describe the situation as a glaring and insidious achievement gap. The color line that W.E.B. Du Bois so insightfully identified as the 20th century's biggest problem has become an achievement gap in the 21st.
The gap now measures four years long. By the end of high school, African American and Latino students have skills in both reading and mathematics that are virtually identical to those of white students at the end of middle school, Kati Haycock (p. 11) tells us, quoting statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics. The gap has grown worse in the past 10 years.
We know the consequences of the achievement gap. Blacks and Latinos are much less likely than whites to graduate from high school, acquire a college degree, or earn a living that places them in the middle class. Blacks are three times more likely to be poor than are whites, and twice as likely to be unemployed. Blacks and Latinos are much more likely than whites to suffer the social and health problems that often accompany low income (Chubb & Lovelace, p. 1).
In a recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll, 94 percent of the general public say that it is very or somewhat important to close the achievement gap. The public acknowledges that many other factors contribute: home upbringing, economic disadvantage, community environment, lack of parental involvement in or value for education, racist attitudes, and student lack of interest. But 29 percent, up from 21 percent one year ago, say the achievement gap is mostly caused by the quality of schooling that students receive.
Schools cannot solve sociopolitical problems alone, but, together with state and federal governments, schools can take important actions. Our authors in this issue, in addition to exploring the causes of the achievement gap, point out some of those actions. Kati Haycock addresses the issue of teacher quality. Placing a highly qualified teacher in every classroom, as the No Child Left Behind Act ordains, is a promising idea that will require long-term funding and commitment—the funding and commitment that we did not fully invest to achieve racial integration.
Sonia Nieto (p. 6) recommends that we ask ourselves some “profoundly multicultural questions” about fairness and equal access. One of them should be, What can we do now so that 50 years from today we are not writing about the reemergence of the widening achievement gap?
